Q.In using Gmail, Chrome and Drive, I know I’ve sold my privacy to the god of convenience. Still, today Google wanted to tell me about “some new features” and prompted me to click my acceptance. I’m reluctant to click. What is this?

A. As you know — and as stated in its privacy policy — Google collects personal information about you from the free services you use, both to make its products more useful to you and also to send specific advertisements your way based on what it knows about you. While this collected information has been readily available for you to see in your Google Account settings, the company recently revamped those pages in the My Activity section, where you can see all your Google-related history in one long scroll.

Google has also added new controls for the types of advertisements you see around the web. The banner alerts and pop-up boxes announcing “Some new features for your Google Account” refer to these changes on how Google uses and organizes your collected information, and you are offered the option to turn them on for your account right there.

If you agree to the changes, you are basically allowing Google to use all of the information it has about you — gathered from computers and devices you use with your Google Account — to tailor the ads you see on Google pages, as well as on other sites you visit around the web. If you do not mind having your information collected so that sites can serve up targeted ads, opting into the new features gives you more control over what you do see.

For example, if you searched for a Rocket Raccoon T-shirt online to give as a gift to your Marvel Comics-loving friend and then constantly saw ads for that very Rocket Raccoon T-shirt following you around the web, you could click the close box on the ad to get rid of it there — and on all the other devices associated with your Google Account.